Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight

In which Miss Lavendar is sad and becomes increasingly attached to Paul, and the romantic ending to her story begins to come into focus, much to Anne's delight.

AAAH, look how cute this one is! Published by Sweet Cherry Publishing in 2018, with cover and illustrations by Elena Distefano. This is another oddly rare one to show an actual scene from the book, in this case Anne's embarrassing introduction to a famous author, when she was in kerchief and an old dress for cleaning and had just been changing the feathers in a mattress, oh and had accidentally turned her nose red. Ms. Distefano apparently decided to leave out the dyed nose, which admittedly would have looked rather odd and off-putting on a completely out-of-context cover. As it is, Anne just looks adorably flustered, and I love her.

Another extra-long one, so once again lots of notes coming your way!

5:50 - "fish days." Davy's talking about days where you "fast" by eating fish instead of meat, as Catholics used to do every Friday, and as several religions still do every Friday of Lent. It's established in the first book that the Cuthberts are Presbyterian and as near as I can tell they never had the "every Friday" rule, so he's likely just talking about various days of religious observation.

7:24 - "grow like pigweed in the night." "Pigweed" can apparently refer to any of a number of different weedy plants that have been used as pig feed, but I'm pretty sure this is probably referring to Amaranthus retroflexus. 

9:25 - "flourish like green bay trees." This is a reference to Psalm 37:35, which reads in the King James Bible as "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree." It's apparently more correctly translated as something like "a tree in its native soil." It didn't originally refer to any specific type of tree, but translations usually go with the bay laurel, an evergreen tree (thus, flourishing all year round) whose leaves were used to make the ancient Greek and Roman laurel wreaths and crowns and which, I am only just now learning, is the plant that the bay leaf comes from. Huh.

13:28 - "blue pills." This is vague enough that it could mean just about anything, but there's a good chance Miss Lavendar is referring to the medicine known as "blue mass," a — yikes — mercury-based medicine of the time that was prescribed for everything from syphilis to constipation to toothache to childbirth pains to tuberculosis. Miss Lavendar is probably talking about how it was also prescribed for melancholia (now known as "depression.") In fact, Abe Lincoln supposedly took it for just that reason, though of course he eventually died due to a different sort of heavy-metal poisoning altogether.

. . .too soon?

14:28 - "pelican of the wilderness." This is another Psalms reference, this one to Psalm 102:6, part of a prayer outlining how miserable and wretched the supplicant is: "I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert" (KJV, again.) Once again it's unclear what specific birds are being referred to here, with other translations going with some variety of owl. Regardless, it's some sort of solitary bird in the desert, or wilderness, or ruins, or wasteland. Basically the antithesis of Anne Shirley in a strawberry patch.

19:18 - "vine and fig tree." Another Biblical reference, though not Psalms this time. A version of the phrase is actually used three times: Micah 4:4, 1 Kings 4:25, and Zechariah 3:10, all of them basically referring to the simple joy of living on your own land.

26:20 - "subscribed to the salary." The salary of a local minister in towns like Avonlea were paid by the congregation themselves, who would all pledge to pay a certain amount to make the total promised. Mr Harrison has apparently agreed to pay a share as well.

28:52 - "capital of Afghanistan." Ooh, I know this one! It's Kabul!

28:54 - "dates of the Wars of the Roses." Ooh, I definitely do not know this one! They're apparently May 22, 1455 - June 16, 1487. The Wars of the Roses, incidentally, were a war between rival factions of the House of Plantagenet, the Yorks and the Lancasters, who both claimed the throne of England. They basically wiped each other out, ending with the Lancastrian Henry Tudor killing off Yorkie Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, then taking the crown as Henry VII and marrying Elizabeth of York, uniting the houses (more or less) and creating the new House of Tudor. I'm sure there are some nuances I'm missing, but I got the dates and so am one up on Anne's students.

29:20 - "organdy." Organdy is a thin, semi-sheer, plain weave cotton fabric. It's best known as a stiff fabric used for curtains and petticoats, but there was also a soft version of it used for dresses.

29:49 - "Foreign Missions." Presumably, Miss Lavendar means she donated to the missionaries in the church who would go to foreign countries.

31:39 - "burst flower-like into rosy bloom." This is from the 1866 poem Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl, by John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier was a Quaker, and best known for his work and writings as an abolitionist. Abolition thankfully and by necessity went out of favor after the Civil War, at which point he wrote Snow-Bound, his most successful work. It's a long narrative poem, framed as a series of stories told by a family while snowed in. The quote in question is describing how the "old, rude-fashioned room" they are in lights up when the hearth-fire is lit.

38:00 - "Prince Charming." Okay, obviously you all know what this means, the stock fairy-tale prince who exists solely to rescue the heroine and provide her with a happily-ever-after marriage. Most famously, the princes in Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella fit the bill. But it did get me to wondering where the specific term came from. Not Disney, of course, since Anne of Avonlea predates any of his works by decades. Arguably, it indirectly grew from two tales by Madame d'Aulnoy written in the 1600s: The Story of Pretty Goldilocks (no, not that Goldilocks) in which the hero's name was Avenant ("Fine" or "Beautiful" in French), and The Blue Bird, in which the hero was Le roi Charmant ("The Charming King.") When Andrew Lang published these stories in the 1890s in his Blue and Green Fairy Books, respectively, he translated the names to "Charming" and "King Charming."

Close, but those guys aren't princes! It seems that the first known use of the exact term "Prince Charming" is in, of all places, the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It's what the doomed actress Sibyl calls Dorian as he courts her. It's interesting that this first use of the term is already deconstructed and ironic, as (spoilers) Dorian is not exactly the hero of the tale, and certainly does not deliver a happily-ever-after to Sibyl.

41:23 - "nods and becks and wreathed smiles." This comes from the poem "L'Allegro" by John "Paradise Lost" Milton, published in 1645. "L'Allegro" means "The Happy Man," and it's a pastoral poem framed as a supplication to the Greek goddess Euphrosyne, the Grace of Mirth. The line is from a portion where he's asking her to appear:

Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles...

The companion piece to this poem is "Il Penseroso," or "The Melancholy Man," a structurally identical poem where the writer dismisses all joy from his mind and hails an unnamed goddess of Melancholy. So. . . not so much Anne Shirley, except maybe in her more dramatic moments.

If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!